I'm a Libertarian living in Humboldt County, CA. I've lived here in Eureka since 1973 and joined the Libertarian Party in 1992. This blog will mostly focus on local political issues, but I may stray into state and national issues as well, when I can't help myself. Please post your comments by clicking on the "comments" link at the bottom of each post. Although I do moderate comments, you need not be a registered user to post them.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

No On Plastic Bag Ban Facebook Group

Someone has started a Facebook group in opposition to the monkey see, monkey do proposal to ban so- called single use shopping bags in Humboldt County. Hope more will join as I have.

Banning plastic bags makes no sense. Most of them are reused for household waste. Do they want us to buy bags for household weaste that are more expensive and have more packaging theat has more adverse environmental impact than plastic bags? Do they want us to use paper pags instead of plastic bags? paper bags are much more worse for the envirionment that plastic bags. Why not read the science before trying to be cool and prove that we are environmentally responsible.

I bring home many more bags than I could use so I end up recycling them at Murphy's. Actually I've found that the only time I actually NEED a plastic bag is for frozen food that will start melting, so I'm just going to carry a couple in the car.

I always have a couple of the store bought "reusable" bags in my truck. What plastic bags we do end up with I usually recycle at Rite Aid or Winco.

I do like to have a few plastic bags around the house for various purposes, though, and it drives me nuts when I need one but don't have one. I make a point now of trying to leave a couple aside for whatever uses I might find for them. If nothing else, I use one to put all the other plastic bags in when I take them to the store for recycling.

Recycling plastic bags is just another industry ploy to make us feel good about using their products when there are more sustainable alternatives around (i.e. reusable bags). The truth is that less than 5% of all plastic grocery bags get recycled, according to the last state report on this issue.

We were doing fine before the plastic grocery bag was introduced in the 1970s. And while I agree that single-use paper bags can also have some environmental impact, the intent of these policies is to reduce our waste and encourage reuse (i.e. 125 uses or more).